In the beginning of winter in London last year, a tiny Indian painting from the 16th century (29.8 cm in height and 18.6 cm in width) was sold for a whopping $13.6 million (about Rs 120 crore then), creating ripples in the Indian art market. A Family of Cheetahs in a Rocky Landscape, the painting by Basawan, an artist in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar, was part of an auction of exceptional paintings from the personal collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan by Christie’s in October last year.
The auction, which also featured an 18th-century Kotah painting by Shaykh Taju, an artist in the court of Maharao Umed Singh, which fetched $6.7 million (about Rs 59 crore), and a 17th-century painting, A Prince Hawking by Mughal painter Muhammad Ali, which was sold for $5.2 million (about Rs 46 crore), represented the revival of Indian miniatures in the country’s art market. Two months later, the buzz is refusing to die. “Indian collectors, who, after ignoring and downplaying the importance of historical Indian art for many years, are all of a sudden interested, and are shopping not only in India, but in international auctions,” says American art scholar Debra Diamond, the curator of South Asian and Southeast Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, US. “There is a great deal of interest among buyers in the Gulf as well for Mughal paintings,” adds Diamond, who was a speaker at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF).
Curiosity for classical
“Indian court paintings, whether Rajput, Mughal or Pahari, people still want to see beauty,” says Diamond, explaining the increasing interest in classical Indian art among connoisseurs in India and abroad. “When we exhibit these small paintings, people find themselves in a magical world because of their sheer beauty and technique,” she adds.
The same revelation happened to Diamond decades ago when she was working in the art world in the US. “I was in my 20s when I picked up a 16th-century Pahari painting,” recalls Diamond, a renowned specialist in Indian court paintings. “I was working at the Parsons School of Design then. It was a painting from 1560 and had a deep river background and a square rhythm and composition. I had never seen anything like that before,” she says, adding, “I quit my job, went back to graduate school and spent nine years studying Indian art and Sanskrit because I had seen something that was extraordinary.”
Diamond never looked back. The Elizabeth Moynihan curator for South and Southeast Asian Art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, Diamond has been working for the last two decades to bring classical Indian art to audiences abroad. Many exhibitions of historical Indian paintings conceived by Diamond with the help of other scholars and art historians, both in India and abroad, have helped lead a revival of interest in Indian miniatures, as witnessed at the Christie’s auction in London last year.
“I have certainly devoted my life to making audiences aware of the extraordinary power of Indian art, which has been considered less good than Western art,” says Diamond, who spoke about classical Indian art to crowded sessions at the JLF. “And I aim to show the opposite.”
Art and appreciation
In the US alone, there will be three exhibitions of Pahari paintings this spring—at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. “We, curators of these three museums, have worked together with other scholars in order to see if we could push the field forward and create new knowledge, and then go back to our museums and make separate exhibitions,” explains Diamond, curator of such acclaimed exhibitions as Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (2008), Yoga: The Art of Transformation (2013), and the more recent A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur.
The exhibitions and auctions are opening up the world of Indian miniatures to new ways of appreciation of classical Indian art. Among the many miniatures that have captured the imagination of art lovers and scholars in recent times are an untitled early 17th-century Pahari painting of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and his kaviraj Sundar Das, The Descent of the Ganges, an 18th-century Kangra painting showing two women sitting in a garden, another 18th-century miniature, titled Krishna and His Family Watching a Solar Eclipse, a 1750 Mandi painting portraying an intimate couple, and a late 18th-century Kishangarh-style painting, The Hour of Cow Dust (Krishna and Radha).
“There is a lot of interest in young students on gender and sexuality in Indian paintings, for example. That is a big new direction,” says Diamond. “I know at least two Indian graduate students who are writing about images and representations of women in historical Indian paintings so that we can move beyond, ‘Yeah, she is a pretty woman’-type of thing,” she adds. “That is the new lens. And more paintings are being discovered. There is so much that is not known. Each time we look at any given painting, they all open up new worlds. The past is a forgotten place and it is our job to bring it back.”
While the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, boasts of a large collection of Indian miniature paintings, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, Switzerland, is believed to house the biggest and best collection of Pahari paintings. The biggest collection of Mughal and Rajput paintings outside of India are at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Library and the British Museum in London, as Diamond says, “for all the historical reasons you can imagine”. “One of the great things about historical Indian paintings is that you can be truly surprised,” says Diamond. “They will open up doors into ways of thinking, of understanding the world that we just don’t have anymore.”
